SimCity: How I made $20 million

I started playing SimCity with one goal: to make lots and lots of money. Truth is I suck at making money in real life so I wanted to translate that into a virtual setting.

While the game does a great job of teasing you into making a big metropolis with lots of people, it takes a lot of time to manage a city of thousands of people that require utilities, services and infrastructure.

The simplest way to make money is to get something for free --- like coal, oil and ore -- and sell it at a profit.

It's capitalism, SimCity style!

The First City

3x refineries pumping out 9,833.6 barrels of oil a day, trading them at $4,500 per 1,000 barrels.

"What does this mean," you ask?

It means I make a lot of money.

How how does it compare to coal and ore mining? Let's use a simple equation of Profit Per Hour (PPH) to show how easy it is to make money in SimCity.

Now, each refinery makes:

9,833 / 1000 x $4,500 = $45,249 per day.

That works out to a little over $1,800 per hour.

So if you have three refineries working at once, that's around $5,500 per hour.

The Second City

With the first city I wanted to make plastic but I made a major design error and basically had to start from scratch, so I thought I'd try my luck at Ore and Coal mining. I'm glad I did because it paid off.

Big time!

I took out some large bonds, and shortly after I had a large bank account.

Ore: 3x refineries with all upgrades (4x shafts) making 96 Ore per day, trading at $5,833 per 10 units.

Coal: 3x refineries with all upgrades (4x shafts) making 96 Coal per day, trading at $4,423 per 10 units.

Some quick calculations will show that I was making $42,461 per day in profit.

96 (Coal) / 10 x $4,423 = $42,461 per day, with a PPH of $1,769.20.

As you can see that's a very similar total to the amount of money oil was bringing it.

Ore: 96 / 10 X $5,833 = $55,997 per day, with a PPH of
$2,333.20.

Eventually you'll unlock Mining HQ, at which time I was told by my guidance counsellor to set up a Commerce Division.

I wasn't convinced, and instead went with a Smelting Division to make alloy and metal.

Before long I was exporting and earning a lot of money, roughly $10,000 an hour.

I chose alloy because the export costs were so high, at about $48,000 per 10 units, so as you can imagine your funds quickly increase.

So once I stopped exporting ore and coal to use it at the smelting factory, profits increased by a stunning 830%.

Importing

Eventually I found myself running out of room, which limited growth and cut my profits.

So I proposed closing the coal and ore factories and import these materials for new smelting factories.

Imported Ore at $5,833 per 10 tons, and Coal at $4,423 per 10 tons, Revenue of $464,400 (like above) - subtract the costs of Coal ($56K) and Ore ($42.5K) brings it to $365,964, which is a PPH of $15,248!

It is less than the $19,350 PPH above, but I bulldozed the less efficient coal and ore mines which were only making 1/8th of that.

Soon I had a sea of Smelt Factories, with no Ore or Coal mines and had around $3 million in the bank.

But I wasn't satisfied!

What does one do with alloy?

I invested in processors in electronics, which cost $67,000, but when importing plastic to make them I ended up breaking even, with neither money gained or lost.

While I made no money at the time, the processors I had created paved the way for an electronics division, which meant I was creating televisions at a very fast rate.

TVs were selling at $197,654 per 1000! And that was a lot of money!

So I did some numbers on TV

Consuming

3,000

Plastic

$36,009

Consuming

3,000

Processor

$201,000

Producing

6,000

TV

$1,185,924

Profit

$948,915 (day)

$39,538 (hour)

So now I am rich.

At least in SimCity.

$40K a hour, and I have eight factories running, which means $320K in profit per hour.

It wasn't long before I had $20M.

@Beta has challenged me to reach $100 million in the bank: challenge accepted!

By EndBoss

Link to ushttp://pc.mmgn.com/Articles/how-i-built-a-rich-city-in-simcity

punk said: Type FUND
I still want to build a megacity, something SIM CITY can no longer offer

I am very close. @EndBoss doesn't get the gratification in having a busy city with happy residents :P you can make enough money to build anything you want, and I am getting more enjoyment in just building a sick city with skyscrappers lol

But at the same time cities like this are really important because they can fund your own region.